Tag Archives: Beringia

For many years anthropologists were certain that the Americas remained outside the human realm until the great icecap of North America had begun to melt decisively. This view stemmed partly from the only conceived route being across the exposed floor of the Bering Sea when sea-level had fallen to leave it as a landmass known as Beringia. The other literal stumbling block had been the glacial blockage of the only lowland corridor from Alaska to the Great Plains which roughly follows the Alberta – British Columbia border in Canada. There is abundant evidence that the corridor did not become ice-free until about 13 ka, an important fact that for a long while bolstered the Clovis-First hypothesis, from the eponymous and highly distinctive stone tools that date back to just after that time. After a long, sturdy rearguard action by its devotees that view was transcended by finds of earlier tools with dates as old as 15.5 ka that extend close to the southernmost tip of South America. Studies of Y-chromosome DNA from living First Nations men that suggested that all early Americans stemmed from 4 separate colonising populations who may have entered via Beringia by different routes, including along the Pacific coast. A possible common ancestor of all native Americans has turned up from the mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA of a fossil skeleton from near Lake Baikal in Siberia who lived about 24 ka ago. But yet another twist has emerged from the Yukon Territory of Northern Canada.

Beringia Land Bridge. Animation of its development from 21.000 BC to modern times.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Since 1987 it has been known that animal bones with clear signs of butchery occurred in the Bluefish Cave on the Yukon – Alaska border. Dating of the bones by the 14C method seemed to support human occupation there during the Last Glacial Maximum; highly controversial at the time, in the absence of any other sites of that age in the whole Americas. The material has now been re-examined and dated by a more advanced radiocarbon method (Bourgeon, L. et al. 2017. Earliest human presence in North America dated to the Last Glacial Maximum: new radiocarbon dates from Bluefish Caves, Canada. PLoS ONE, v. 12; doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0169486). This work has confirmed the earlier view since the ages of bones range from 24 to 12 ka. But the discovery of what seems long-term occupation under the most arduous glacial conditions is not the only outcome of the research. One hypothesis for the genetic diversity among living indigenous people of the Americas is that their forebears, the first people of the Americas, may have been from genetically isolated populations stranded on Beringia, yet surviving eventually to migrate southward once climate warmed. The ‘Beringian standstill hypothesis’ suggest that the small population underwent genetic drift for about eight thousand years, their descendants inheriting the genetic diversity produced by this process. Bluefish Cave is probably where some of those pioneers waited-out the Ice Age

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